EMPLOYERS

Successful companies obsess over shaping amazing customer experiences, and for good reason. Recent McKinsey research shows that improving customer experience resulted in increased sales revenues of 2%-7% and increased profitability of 1%-2%.

The best companies, however, prioritize workforce experience (WX) alongside customer experience (CX) because making it easy for employees to create memorable CXs is an important part of ensuring that customers return. By putting both customers and employees at the center of insights and analytics, a company inherently puts the focus on human-centered design. For those unfamiliar with human-centered design, this article from Chicago Booth provides some “squeaky clean” perspectives on design thinking and human-centered design.

In order to place customers and employees at the center of design, strategy and analytics leaders must first holistically understand the following experiences:
• For employees, it’s understanding their workflows and processes.
• For customers, it starts with the customer journey, which begins pre-purchase and continues throughout the customer lifecycle.

Providing Guidance at the Right Moment

There are moments during the customer journey when they either make decisions or require guidance. These moments are fortified when a company can provide the customer a more guided experience, informed by employee expertise that is augmented by analytical insights.

One key moment in the customer journey is the point of purchase — when a prospective customer decides what product or service to buy as well as which company they want to purchase from. Companies who provide their account executives with specific, actionable, data-driven insights about a prospect lead to more tailored offerings and, resultantly, a boost to sales conversions.

It’s imperative for companies to make it easy for employees — specifically those in customer success roles or in charge of maintaining customer relationships — to access those insights inside applications they already use. One way to master this, and to incorporate a human-centered solution design, is by embedding insights generated by a customer conversion predictive model within a CRM. This will allow an account executive to see customer facts, insights, and recommendations all under a “single pane of glass.”

Why Delivering Insights With Ease Is So Important

Deploying solutions built using human-centered design is critical in my current industry, workers’ compensation insurance. Oftentimes, our customer is not the policyholder who purchases the insurance policy, but is, instead, an injured worker who needs to file a claim.

“‘Ease’ needs to be part of business requirements and solution design for both employees and customers from the very start. Always start with people. Only then should you align with business viability and investigate technical feasibility “

When a worker gets hurt on the job, they’re vulnerable, physically hurt, and usually don’t know how to navigate the claims process. It's imperative that the claims adjuster guides the injured worker through the process with care and empathy. Claims adjusters are empowered to provide this personalized experience when they can focus on the person — the injured worker — and not on the various systems they need to navigate in the course of their work.

Insurance carriers are more frequently utilizing machine learning models that enable many decisions to be automated, freeing claims adjusters to focus on supporting their customers while also directing their attention toward more complicated facets of claims management. While machine learning models that produce tailored insights are important, it is also critical to be thoughtful about how to deliver insights so that users, such as claims adjusters, can actually leverage them. Employees shouldn’t have to guess where they can find these insights, and if it’s not easy, they oftentimes simply won’t bother.

Making it easy for claims adjusters to quickly access analytical insights can help guide the conversation with the injured worker. These insights can accelerate the claims process, which not only helps the injured worker receive their benefits sooner, but it may help them get back to work earlier by ensuring they’re getting appropriate, timely medical care. Taking a human-centered design approach to machine learning results in empowered and efficient workers’ compensation claims adjusters who can provide a personalized, compassionate care experience. Delivering this humancentered design at scale is also what develops a customer’s bond to a brand.

Leading From Experience

Throughout my career, I’ve led teams that deliver analytical insights that put humans at the center of their design, helping them “automate the ordinary so they can focus on the extraordinary.” Customers across all industries now expect these easier, increasingly guided experiences. Humancentered design is a capability embraced by businesses that are able to separate and distance themselves from their competitors when it comes to creating excellent CXs.

To deliver on these experiences, it’s incumbent on chief data analytics officers and the talented practitioners within their organizations to design analytical insight solutions so they can be easily adopted within employees’ workflows, instead of expecting employees to figure out how to access and leverage them in clumsy and cumbersome ways.

“Ease” needs to be part of business requirements and solution design for both employees and customers from the very start. Always start with people. Then, and only then, should you align to business viability and investigate technical feasibility. Always put the human — the customer, the injured worker, your employees — at the center of everything you do.